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Africa and the Neocolonial Development Mirage “We will have to rely on ourselves, our own resources and our efforts” Thabo Mbeki The United Nations summit of 14 – 16 September in New York has ended without the agenda of Africa’s development occupying central debate.

Like the media – hyped G8 summit of 6 – 8 July on Debt Relief in Gleneagles; Scotland, the UN Summit once again derailed the focal issues of the Millennium Development Goals (universal Primary Education, eradication of poverty, gender equality, reducing child mortality, environmental sustainability, fight against disease etc) in favour of reforms of the United Nations, and definitions of terrorism.

Established in September 2000, the Millennium Development Goals provided an economic vision that would ensure that poverty is reduced by half by the year 2015. Ten years before 2015, economic experts are already predicting that these goals will not be met as many countries (12 out of the 18 countries are from Africa), have already fallen off track. Only the Mauritius Island and Botswana stand head high in Africa. Economic experts lay the blame on the inequitable character of world trade and the dismal governance and development orientations imposed on Africa leadership, by Western multinational establishments.

Africa’s leadership has compounded an already bad situation through its prebendal governance, liberalised autocracies kleptomaniac economies, frivolous electioneering expenditure, and intellectual persecution. Therefore, most of the people who attended the just ended UN summit are more of the problem than solution to Global Poverty. African leaders are still to draw a line between African real economies and neocolonial economy. If our leaders have to pursue the paths of structural and human developments, they must focus on development models inspired by indigenous impetus and self-reliance rather than follow the desiderata of Washington, Bruxelles and Paris.

It is no secret that Africa’s Independence Development Goals which include road infrastructure, access to health facilities, educational system and a sustainable agricultural policy have been weakened by pontifications decreed by the Bretton Woods Institutions. Structural Adjustment Programs, Enhanced structural adjustment Facility, Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative and the litany of buzz words imperialist experts continue to invent have all tended to increase the poverty status of the average African. Joseph Stiglitz (former chief economist of the World Bank) stunned the world when he admitted that countries that have succeeded in the recent past have ignored International Monetary Fund (IMF) advice and those who have followed it have failed. As I am writing, more than 20.000 people are in the streets of Abuja lambasting IMF policy in Nigeria.

Obscene capital fight, unbridled embezzlement, brazen corruption and barefaced unpatriotism have made the lives of many Africans to remain highly deficient. It is in response to this state of affairs that African leaders, in July 2001, conceived the economic package called New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and its governance out fit called African Peer Review Mechanism.

It was Africa’s recognition that the relationship between the West and Africa was more of promises than performance, more of patronage than partnership, more of hand – out than hands on and more of global pillage than global village, that necessitated the change from the O. A.U to a stronger African Union. For the African Union to hold its own, and for the African people to see its economic benefits, African countries must go back to the economic drawing board where the state takes its responsibility as an agent of development.

So far and especially with the resurgence of political liberalization in Africa, African states have lost the legal means to regulate economic factors in a development programme and to give a planned national vision to economic life. Seminars, summits and fora on Africa’s development have been so belaboured that palpable action has been compromised. Carlos Lopes (UNDP staff) admits that we do not talk about development; we know it when we see it for development is a lived experience. If development is to be spread in our national spaces, the state must intervene in Introspective Planning. According to Amadou Ahidjo, Introspective planning expresses our concern for rationally using the available resources, reducing the part of chance in the economic venture and deliberately orienting development towards calculated and predetermined targets.

This, arguably, accounts for Cameroon’s macro-economic success during the Ahidjo years of a five-year development plan. It is this kind of Introspective planning that accounts for the success story in Botswana, Uganda and Libya. Here is the place to say and this is a pressing invitation that Agriculture ought to be given greater concern in Africa. But what Agriculture? Hear Paul Biya “Our agriculture has for a very long time been unstable because the colonial masters gave all their attention to export crops (coffe, cocoa, cotton) to the detriment of food crops which were of interest to the local people only.

Today, agriculture requires that we balance the assistance given to these two types of crops particularly encouraging the development of large scale food crop farms. In this way, it will not only be a question of reinforcing our food self-sufficiency but also one of meeting the needs of an already existing regional and sub-regional market”.

To attain this food self-sufficiency, African governments needs to subsidise farmers as it obtains in the West, encourage autocentric Industrialisation, provide farm to market roads, put their natural resources at the doorsteps of their own people and focus on a productive capacity of appropriate technology rather than a consumption appetite of advanced technology.

Is the maxim producing what we consume and consuming what we produce not still relevant today? Our colonial educational legacy remains an embarrassing cog in the wheel of African development mainly because our schools are mere copy-cats of Western education. We need creative education – one based on vocational /technical training; one based on skills not just knowledge; one that equips our students with the weapon of self-employment. Our Governments should link 40% of urban dwellers to 60% of rural masses through effective governing decentralisation or local governments. Without this, the gains of economic growth will never be felt at the bottom of the national pyramid.

Pompous reforms that provide our predatory elites with bloated luxuries and privileges to the detriment of an equitable redistribution service have only widened the chasm between economic princes and economic paupers. Africa’s medical record is dismal with malaria, typhoid, meningitis and tuberculosis still rife. While these diseases can be combated by state subsidy and a higher citizen purchasing power, AIDS still remains a holocaust with 26 million Africans ostensibly living with HIV virus. No disease has entirely depended on Abstinence and Faithfulness for its control. A vaccine mentality should work in tandem with the virus propagation.

The greatest harm Neocolonialism has done to us is to distort our economic minds into believing that modernisation is tantamount to Development. Basil Davidson (British journalist/Africanist) argues that failures and futilities have occurred within a specific context of the attempt to develop Africa out of the history of Europe or America and primarily for the benefit of Europe and America rather than out of the history of Africa for the prime benefit of Africa. The objective of any development is to improve various aspects of living conditions. Development must furnish society with the means of offering man the conditions for living a full life. The UN Human Development Report corroborates this theory every year. Doris Ross (IMF mission chief for Cameroon) is on record for saying that the completion point is not what Cameroonians should focus on.

They should rather focus on Cameroon’s future. In other words Doris Ross is urging Cameroonians to formulate a homegrown development reality that transcends the elixir called “completion point”. Is Doris not echoing the same sentiments I expressed in my “Vision 2020” article and for which I still enjoy administrative suspension? Or is a white truth better than a black one? And so, when our various countries achieve national successes in development, then intra-African trade and the Africa common market will now gain momentum. This is the only way the African Union will achieve what it stipulates in Article 3(k) of its constitution and which reads “ to promote cooperation in all fields of human activity inorder to raise the living standards of African people”.

The Dag Hammarskjold Foundation advises that development can only come from within society which defines in total sovereignty its vision and its strategy and counts first and foremost on its internal strengths. Civil society (if it is organised and perceived by governments as partners) has the means to help focus Africa’s development. This means scholars, non-state actors and activist elements of the civil society should reject their complacency and self-defeat and propose practical endogenous economic paradigms that respond to viable economic development.

Africa is not in short supply of strategist leaders but if these leaders insist on disconnecting with their own people to pursue a futile partnership and international posturing with neo-colonial economic platitudes then the homegrown economic vaccine needed to stop the virus of neo-colonial development mirage will continue to elude us. The result is that every UN Human Development Report will remain a permanent doom and gloom prophecy in the history of Africa’s human poverty index.

© 2006 Mwalimu George Ngwane

George E. Ngwane is a writer, poet, peace activist, educationist, political analyst, Pan Africanist and founder/Executive Director of AFRICAphonie

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